May 12, 2013

We’ve completed our three month commitment to GAPS, but we’re pretty much still eating “full GAPS”. We love the food, and it’s not that hard to stay on it at home. We are adding healthy things that we miss (like quinoa) in slowly, and we’re not quite as stringent when outside the house (like eating pasteurized cheese at a party).

The original recipe calls for a spring form pan. We don’t have one, so we tried cupcakes (they work great – but they don’t come out of the papers when warm) and a 13×9″ stoneware pan (also worked well).

Frosting recipe is from Sue Gregg‘s Dessert cookbook. (Joshua was very excited to have chocolate frosting!)

Well I guess the girls have fallen off the blogging wagon and lost their posting momentum! This is mom again…

Most of us are now on Full GAPS and we’re enjoying a bit more freedom in what we can eat. We missed raw fruit and veggies quite a bit and of course there are more baked good options now including donuts and waffles! These are made from white beans and coconut flour – toppings are fermented blueberries, coconut manna spread, local raw honey, and nut butter (made from sprouted and dehydrated almonds, walnuts, pumpkin and sunflower seeds). We’re still primarily eating soups, good meats (picked up a quarter of a cow yesterday!), and ferments for another couple months. Everyone’s putting on weight (a VERY good thing in our scrawny family) and digestive systems are working well. Hopefully we’re healing any leaky gut issues and building up healthy intestinal flora….

{edit by Jordan} I found the waffle recipe! It’s here on The Spunky Coconut. We have a donut maker like this one that works just like a waffle iron, so we use the waffle recipe to make healthy donuts too!

March 11, 2013

Tomorrow marks the end of our 40 day adventure on the GAPS intro diet! It’s gone by fast and yet in some ways it feels like we’ve always eaten this way. I’ve made a lot of trips to stores which is very odd for me since I’ve always gotten most of our food delivered to our house once a month by azurestandard.com and just had my husband pick up supplemental produce as needed. But we used to live on a lot of dry good staples like lentils, beans, rice, and grains. They were sprouted and soaked and very healthy, but they’re not allowed right now. With GAPS it’s all fresh and perishable: meat, bones for stock, and lots of vegetables, which must be replenished every few days for freshness. An extra fridge would have helped so much, but we gave it up to have an upright freezer which also comes in very handy.

So we’ve started to make some treats that will be allowed on Full GAPS later this week. Here Joshua is making “goodie balls” with dried coconut (a new item we can have soon–he’s only pretending to eat something forbidden :). They’re made from soaked and sprouted almonds, fermented dates, and coconut oil blended up in food processor. Sometimes we use sprouted pumpkin or sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, raw honey or cream cheese (made from dripping yogurt to remove the whey). We also made our favorite fudge with the coconut, almonds, coconut oil, raw honey, and raw cacao. Can’t wait to celebrate the end of our fast with these sweets chilling right now in the fridge, but we’re also VERY excited about adding in white beans, lentils, and raw fruit. Stay tuned….

March 7, 2013

Every morning for the past week we’ve started our day with a glass of freshly juiced veggies and an apple or two. Getting the fresh taste of celery and carrot after a whole month of cooked veggies has been a real blessing; one I might not have counted before!

March 5, 2013

Ghee is the preferred oil to cook with and to add to food during the healing phase of the GAPS diet. We scramble eggs in it and add it to our bowls of soup or butternut squash “dessert” to get more healthy fat in our diet.

Josh loves ghee in everything AND he loves to make it! That’s a good thing because we sure go through a lot of it. He fills a crock pot with organic unsalted butter (preferably from pastured cows–thankfully we found some on sale at Sprouts a couple weeks ago).

After about 7 hours on low it all melts and a foam forms on top.

The solids on top are skimmed off (supposedly there are recipes using those so we’re saving them for later) and the ghee is ladled out into containers. In the bottom of the crock is another layer of some kind of white substance. After trying a few techniques of straining with strainers and coffee filters and making a huge mess, we just gave up and poured out the last of the ghee with the stuff in the bottom and put it in the fridge. After chilling, it was watery liquid at the bottom and hard ghee on top which was easily lifted out. Ghee doesn’t need to be refrigerated, has a creamy, soft texture when at room temperature, and is SO tasty…yet another thing we never would have discovered if it weren’t for this GAPS adventure!

March 3, 2013

Who said GAPS food had to be boring? Here’s a sampling of the condiments that are typically available on our table (clockwise, starting at the top): avocado, sour cream, ghee, sauerkraut, ginger carrots. The chicken in the middle is a salt shaker 🙂

March 2, 2013

I’ve been experimenting with culturing raw milk, both from goats and cows. Moriah took some great comparison photos that I’d like to share.

First we have raw goat milk, cultured with Viili yogurt culture. It thickened, but still pours easily – a bit like store-bought kefir.

Next comes raw goat milk cultured with kefir grains (The curd-like stuff that you can see are the grains). This hardly thickened at all, but it did curdle/separate a bit, as you can see in the spoon. There’s also a small kefir grain in the spoon.

Last is the raw cow milk, cultured with Viili yogurt culture. This thickened up very nicely – in fact, a few members of the family think it thickened too well! Below is an additional picture of this yogurt. Notice how it pulls away from the side of the jar in a single mass when I tip it.

Tonight I did a “blind” taste test between the goat and cow yogurts. The results are as follows:

Dad – Cow yogurt, all the way! He quite dislikes goat-anything unless it’s fresh and/or covered up with other flavors.

Mom – detected the goat-y taste immediately and had to get the taste out with something else.

Me – I like them both…but I tend to do that with things I make. It’s like I don’t want to disown a child or something 😉

Moriah – wasn’t feeling well and didn’t taste tonight.

Bethany – Liked the taste of the cow yogurt best, but preferred the thinner texture of the goat yogurt.

Daniel – loved the goat yogurt and wasn’t so sure about the texture of the cow.